


What's in a Name?

by goldfusion



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Coming of Age, F/M, Feels, Graduation, Growing Up, High School, One Shot, One-Sided Attraction, One-Sided Relationship, Romance, Sad Ending, Shiratorizawa, So much angst, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love, Volleyball
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 07:08:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10692216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfusion/pseuds/goldfusion
Summary: When you walked in the room, he’d look. When you spoke, he’d listen. When you smiled… he’d falter.Maybe it was love. Or maybe it was just you.





	What's in a Name?

**Author's Note:**

> Here is a story with so much angst, but there's a little beauty and romance in that (I hope).

A scenery of baby pink. Cherry blossoms in full glory of the dewy spring morning. Wide eyed first-years in freshly ironed uniforms. The boy and girl and the exchange of gazes and smiles. She saw him, he saw her. She blushed, heartbeat disturbed. A love too great to be concluded in any less than an agonizingly dramatic shoujo manga series of seventy plus chapters. Was adolescence not a time of pure and innocent romance?

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), this is not one of those stories.

It _was_ , however, spring. The cherry blossoms _were_ in full bloom, they were yesterday, at least. Overnight, a dense and heavy rain came down from the clouds looming overhead. The cherry blossoms were tattered and defeated, detached from their branches, collectively falling to the ground. The pink colour dulled and darkened from the saturation of water and compression from morning commuter’s footsteps. The petals carpeted the cement roads, adhering to the soles of students’ loafers as they walked to school.

Was there a name for the remnants of the things that used to be beautiful, but were no more?

The spring was not the one of your first days in high school, it was the spring of your last. You were graduating in a week, the thought all too liberating and daunting at the same time. 

As you entered your school gates, thoughts drowned out by the music from your headphones, you took a turn to the left, towards the gymnasium rather than the main building. This was auto piloted by your brain, which seemed to have programmed this detour as a routine that did not require voluntary or conscious thought. Until, that is, you nearly ran into Ushijima as he exited the gym. You found yourself in the presence of his shadow long before his physical form came to sight. He was a titan. 

This customary detour only became customary due to a certain boy’s position in the volleyball team. It became routine to walk to class with him after his morning practice, hand in hand, as the lower-years stared quietly in admiration of the couple.

The titan nodded a greeting to you, and you responded with a smile, plucking out your earphones and stuffing them into your bag.

“Good morning,” he said to you in the same rigid, monotonous voice he was characteristic of, though you might have caught glance of the tiniest lift of the corners of his lips.

“Morning,” you replied, joyous, “finished practice?”

Ushijima nodded. He was still in his jersey. His gym bag hung on his left shoulder. 

Before you exhaled the next quirky remark attempted to elicit some sort of smile from that placid face of his, your supposed subject of fancy exited the gym. Eita, with all the glory of his ashy blond hair, smiled widely as he you met his eye, rising his arm out to welcome you for a hug. You returned his smile with a small one of your own, wrapping your arms around his waist. He smelt of laundry detergent and a faint musk of hormones. 

When you straightened again, Ushijima was already gone. 

You were teased by Tendo as he complained in that dramatic voice of his that this amount of cuddling and affection needed to be saved for the bedroom at night. As Eita held your hand through the halls, of course drawing the attention of some first years, he asked if you had seen the new season of anime that aired last night, and you asked if he had a proper breakfast.

This was the routine. 

You were pretty sure Ushijima didn’t even know your name You were simply “Semi Eita’s girlfriend”, though you were in no position to complain. Eita was considerate, sincere, and interesting. He was passionate about his hobbies, and hardworking just as such. He was 180 cm in height, so between the two of you, there was just the right amount of height gap moe. You had similar tastes in music, anime, and food. You also liked the colour of his hair. 

If you didn’t know better, you’d say you were content. Or perhaps because you knew better, you forced yourself to be somewhat content. 

Sometimes, people ended up with the person they loved, sometimes they didn’t. Reality didn’t fall into place the way shoujo mangas did. That was the cruel joke life played on all of us.

How did it even turn out like this?

By second year, everyone knew of Ushijima. The boy who made it to nationals. You too, knew of him, but it was one of those distant things you kept stored in the very back of your consciousness. His existence mattered little to you. Had he passed you on the street, you'd have notice nothing of him, save for his height. It was safe to say that you almost didn’t know what he looked like. Ushijima was like a god of some sort, but you were an atheist.

Eita was more tangible and more real. He was the boy who ended up sitting next to you in second semester. You were, at least, in the same class. Eventually, as naturally as awkward teenage social interactions could be, you became the subject of each other’s small talk, and between sharing textbooks and being paired for group work, a sort of affinity or tender curiosity blossomed, though in retrospect, that was not love. 

The thing with adolescence, of course, was the lack of self-awareness. For the inexperienced lover, who could really tell the difference between fondness and love?

You began visiting Eita at volleyball practice. When you heard his teammates refer to the tall, largely built, square-jawed boy with a particularly stern face as “Ushijima”, there was a brief moment of “oh, so this is Ushijima”, before you fell back into the inveterate state of coexisting without acknowledgment. But like his towering height, Ushijima’s presence refused to be tucked neatly away in your subconscious. 

The first interaction occurred when Ushijima spotted you standing against the wall of the gym. You smiled in return to his gaze, and as convention has it, he asked for your name. 

What is your name?

A week later, when you paid another visit to the gym, he asked the same thing again.

What is your name?

Just as you had began taking offense at what seemed to be a deliberate, condescending act of ignorance, you realized that perhaps he was genuine in his forgetfulness. He apologized frequently for the words released from his tongue, but only after having uttered them. There was no filter in place for his syntax, but he was not one to be intentionally malevolent.

You smiled at him every time you caught his eye. Eventually, though you may have been delusional, he even made tiny attempts to smile back.

Despite all this, your empathy towards Ushijima did not have time to blossom into some nameable emotion, when it was cut short by Eita’s confession in the winter of your second year. 

The boy had recently dyed his hair an ashy blonde. You made the effort to let him know that you appreciated the change. The day was cold, but bearable. There was no wind. Everything was still. Eita’s ears were red, but you couldn’t tell if it was because he was embarrassed or cold. Perhaps you were too desperate to experience this passion that made the Earth go round, or perhaps you were afraid rejection would spoil the relationship you had with Eita, but that was when and how you got a boyfriend. 

It wasn’t that you didn’t love Eita, he was a source of light. Your relationship was comforting and warm. It was security. But there was a void inside and Eita wasn’t exactly the perfect fit. Of course, you knew, that Ushijima wasn’t the perfect fit either, perhaps even less so, but as cliché has it, a first love is a first love is a first love.

What you were most afraid of was the fact that you didn’t know why you loved Ushijima. The reasons why you liked Eita were easy to name. But Ushijima, the one who never remembered your name, one who seemed incapable of sentiment or warm gestures, there was no nameable reason you could list. If you couldn’t even trace the source of this blind devotion, who is not to say that one day it will simply cease to be? It will disappear with no warning, no reason, just like the haste with which it came to be. 

Was there a name for the never to be, just like that which never was?

This was the last spring of your high school days, you knew that it will pass with the silence and grace of all the ones that had gone before, or you hoped.

One the day of graduation, there were no clouds in the sky. Birds may have chirped but there were too many excited voices of parents and students that you didn’t know. The campus was crowded with excitement and tears of joy, hands occupied by diplomas and cameras, and faces by smiles. 

You were the only one running through the deserted hallways, having forgotten something at your desk. When you had retrieve the misplaced item, your hurried footsteps slowed to a stroll as you made your way back to the front doors. The near silence inside the building was almost eerie compared to the atmosphere outside.

Your head was turned to the side, glancing vacantly at the passing classrooms, empty chairs and empty desks. Taking in the empty shell of a school to which you now had to bid goodbye. But when you passed the classroom belonging to the one and only Ushijima, much to your surprise, he was there. You had to stop yourself abruptly and retrace a step back. Popping your head into the door with bemusement.

He looked up from his desk and met your eye. You smiled. Like usual.

“What are you doing here?” your voice cut through the stillness with a ostensible cheerful note.

“I forgot something,” he replied, short and direct.

“Oh,” you replied, “same.”

Then there was a silence that almost solidified the air. A nagging thought was born into your conscious.

This was perhaps you’re last interaction with your high school crush.

“Do you want to…” you started, voice small and unable to conceal the awkwardness, “head out together?”

Without the slightest hesitation or change of expression, he began making his way towards the door. As you turned to walk, you suddenly felt his grip on your right wrist. His hand was much warmer than yours, and its grasp seemed to extend on forever.

You were startled and snapped your head back to look at him, taken aback. You met his eyes for a brief moment, and his expression was the same as always, not a tad bit softer or warmer, but there was a vague and unfamiliar sentiment in there somewhere you just didn’t know how or where to find it. He didn’t blush, but you were pretty sure you did. 

For two years, unbeknownst to you were the seconds and minutes and days that passed when Ushijima thought so tenderly of you, the sounds whispered of fragmented curiosities and imaginings of your frivolous dreams. 

What is your name?

He asked time and time again, just to hear the resonance of your calling roll off your lips. He liked the way you said it. The way you announced your presence.

He knew little of what to call this feeling of tender curiosity. What’s in a name? They could call it love or likeness, a crush or a musing, but that mattered little more than the jokes his teammate told, the ones he did not laugh at and could not understand. 

Despite his distaste for things he could not understand, Ushijima found himself in no position to detest you. He never addressed his affiliation with you as special, or extraordinary, in fact, he never addressed his affiliation with you at all. This affinity simply was, as you simply were. There was no name no label and no need for definition. When you walked in the room, he’d look. When you spoke, he’d listen. When you smiled… he’d falter. That was just the way it was, no filter, no second thoughts, no hesitation. 

Maybe it was love. Or maybe it was just you. 

Or maybe… there was no maybe now.

What had he intended to convey in those moments of silence with his hand inches from yours? What did he want but could not say? If you really wanted to know, you would have asked.

You lowered your head, turning away. You wiggled your wrist free of him, stepping forward into the hallway.

“We should go,” you said, voice impassive, “Eita’s waiting for me.”

You heard him follow behind you, but you never looked back. For some absurd reason, you felt like sobbing.

Monotony was all too comforting.

This was what the departure of youth looked like. Acceptance of the imperfect in the face of the realization that love, just like human existence, need not burn with the heat of a thousand suns.

What became of you after graduation Ushijima never knew. Maybe he didn’t care to find out or maybe he was afraid to.

 

_There, we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing._

Murakami, _Sputnik Sweetheart_


End file.
